Links for 2015-01-18

‘Here’s a story for you. I’m not a party to any of this. I’ve done nothing wrong, I’ve never been suspected of doing anything wrong, and I don’t know anyone who has done anything wrong. I don’t even mean that in the sense of “I pissed off the wrong people but technically haven’t been charged.” I mean that I am a vanilla, average, 9-5 working man of no interest to anybody. My geographical location is an accident of my birth. Even still, I wasn’t accidentally born in a high-conflict area, and my government is not at war. I’m a sysadmin at a legitimate ISP and my job is to keep the internet up and running smoothly. This agency has stalked me in my personal life, undermined my ability to trust my friends attempting to connect with me on LinkedIn, and infected my family’s computer. They did this because they wanted to bypass legal channels and spy on a customer who pays for services from my employer. Wait, no, they wanted the ability to potentially spy on future customers. Actually, that is still not accurate – they wanted to spy on everybody in case there was a potentially bad person interacting with a customer. After seeing their complete disregard for anybody else, their immense resources, and their extremely sophisticated exploits and backdoors – knowing they will stop at nothing, and knowing that I was personally targeted – I’ll be damned if I can ever trust any electronic device I own ever again. You all rationalize this by telling me that it “isn’t surprising”, and that I don’t live in the [USA,UK] and therefore I have no rights. I just have one question. Are you people even human?’

‘Broadly, they are satisfied with what we are doing’ versus: ‘We have deep concerns about the Eircode initiative… We want to state clearly that we are not at all ‘satisfied’ with the postcode that has been designed or the implementation proposals.’